Word: riga
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...yardstick by which the success of NATO's summit in the Latvian capital of Riga would be measured was always going to be Afghanistan. By engaging 32,000 troops there - its first full-scale military action outside of Europe - against a now resurgent Taliban, the Western alliance had posed itself a cruel test of solidarity in one of the world's most historically ungovernable patches. Last week it effectively failed the test...
...Tuesday, President Kaczynski will travel to Riga to meet with George W. Bush and other leaders to discuss missions in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Memo to POTUS: he is the one with the mole on his cheek. Or is that Jaroslaw...
...history to boast identical twins in its two top political posts. Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski are Poland's President and Prime Minister, respectively. In order not to confuse world leaders, they have a policy of not traveling together to summits such as this week's NATO meeting in Riga. They also try to avoid appearing together at home. Even so, there have been mix-ups. The Financial Times told its readers that Prime Minister Kaczynski visited Britain when, in fact, it was the President. A reporter for BBC Newshour asked President Kaczynski about his earlier talks with the German Chancellor...
Leaders of NATO's 26 member states gather this week in the Latvian capital, Riga, for a summit that will trumpet the solidarity of the world's most successful military alliance. The scripts have been largely written and surprises are unlikely. But as Christoph Bertram, the dean of German security experts, recently noted, the affair will be "like a Christmas service for agnostics, who for most of the year do not pray together or sing from the same hymnbook." The question of what the North Atlantic Treaty Organization should do and become has been a subject of often deep disagreement...
...Afghanistan enough? More troops could be put to good use: NATO has 16,000 soldiers in Kosovo, which is less than 2% the size of Afghanistan. But with major contributing countries already stretched in Iraq, Kosovo and Lebanon, a big infusion of new soldiers is not realistic. So the Riga horse-trading will concentrate on a related problem: that commanders often can't deploy existing troops as they would like because of national limits-or "caveats"-on their use. U.S., British, Canadian and Dutch troops are doing most of the frontline fighting; support from many of the other 33 countries...